but, i seem to have disproven this. and, i have further evidence for disproving this - it's helping me explain something i never really understood.
if you place a vanilla bus right in front of the main mix, you'd think it should just be superfluous, because the main mix is combining everything, anyways. it's a virtual path, so you're not creating resistance or any kind of degradation.
but, every time i've done this i've noticed it isn't accurate. sometimes it's subtle. but parking that vanilla bus in there predictably changes the characteristic of the sound. i've never understood this...
...but perhaps the reason this is true is that it actually creates the merge operation that it seems obvious should be there but doesn't seem to actually be.
what that means is that if somebody wants the behaviour in this diagram, they should put a bus in front of the master out and send everything through it. that will merge the signals.
otherwise, this diagram should really be in parallel - at least up to the channel fader (which is right after the eq).
